goty2

I think the idea from the beginning was to issue equity that diluted the current owners, but that was later revised to taxes on profit and payroll. The concept isn't radically different from a pension fund. But of course the purpose was still that workers could take part in the increased profits of companies. The funds weren't allowed to own more than 50% of the voting rights in any company.

There isn't that much in English written about them, but that is actually a good thing since most of it is of good quality.

http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar... https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/sweden-social-democracy-m...

If anything the Nordic model and social democracy has failed not because it turned into communism, but because it only takes one government to undermine the system and privatize everything. Sweden today is liberal to the extent that it is regularly featured as an example in The Economist on how to privatize more things in the UK.

> After controlling the major companies in Sweden, they would have of course continued with the non-public companies, because the main goal of Löntagarfonder was to create equal salaries between high profit companies and low profit companies.

No, that was the "solidarity in wages" policy which was already implemented. It was this policy that made successful companies make excess profits. Those profits were supposed to go to "Löntagarfonderna".

It wasn't necessarily stupid. But probably ahead of its time. Today, when it is probably too late to do anything, a lot of people are talking about the risks with automation and need for basic income. And that is essentially what it was, to take the increased profits of automation and put them in a sovereign wealth fund for wider distribution without creating inflation.

Because coupons might be useful to sell overstock or introduce new products. And even if you wanted to you would either have to convince all your customers to change their habits or convince the other businesses not to also not use them. It is like with credit card fees in the US.

I don't find that to be an apt analogy. Tax avoidance is more like abusing coupons. Someone else is effectively paying your share, but the company can't shut it down because customer would complain or it could hurt the business overall. Eventually the business is forced to raise prices and everyone deal with coupons just to get a decent deal.

Well, with lump sum taxation you pay taxes primarily based on the value of your property. So the more 'modest' your house is the less tax you pay. Of course the house, or the land more likely, was still worth $4.5 million USD when he moved.

The food market is more expensive if there are multiple vendors and the customer don't shop around.

The price gouging doesn't come from multiple companies, but from the free pricing. Some independent taxis in Sweden charge 10x as much as established companies. Therefor few people would hail a random cab in the street.

Less utilization means the drivers have to charge a higher price to cover their overhead.

In a regulated market you just, in theory, take the closest taxi because you have no choice. But if there are five companies covering the same area, each company is going to have less coverage or need more cars. Each company is going to have to drive longer to pick up passengers. One company might have no cars available and passengers waiting, while another company has empty cars doing nothing. All in all there is less utilization of cars. I am not sure how big the effect would be though.

I am disagreeing with the parents point (or not really because they were talking about doing it as a hobby, which is great).

Yes, you can do design prototype revision A, B and C, then do production prototype A, B and C, and finally production version A, B and C. But then you have spent a significant amount of time and money refining prototypes and adding features. That forces you to large production runs with huge risk, because you have already made the investment. What I am saying is that you should just make the production prototype with less features and ship that. Because that is how you go to market quickly, which is usually the larger point of such development.

This is also why Shenzhen wins over hackerspaces (which are also great btw) but that is another story.

That is still, as you say, a hobby though. The future of hardware design is decreasing the difference between prototype and production. Similar to what containers have done for software.

3d printed parts and PCBs can be done in as little as 12 hours. You can then without any modification do small production runs anywhere from ten to a thousand pieces (which isn't unrealistic outside consumer hardware). You could even 3d print moulds and do injection moulding.

I think partly why people say that hardware isn't iterative enough is that they are doing it the wrong way. They spend too much time on prototyping, which means they then have to make everything perfect for a large production runs to average out the costs.

There is no mystery why taxis are expensive in Sweden. Deregulation legalizes price gouging, meaning few people will ride independent taxis or look a new companies. That doesn't just limit competition, but also puts more taxis on the road in relation to riders. Meaning higher costs.

It is unlikely to happen. Software makes it easier to reconfigure things. It will almost always make sense to rent time on a better machines. Few people run their own public facing arm servers at home, because you can rent better performing and easier to manage servers online.

Proximity and flexibility still matters somewhat though, so there might still be a market for a pick and place machine between this type of machine and a professional one. In China there are pcb factories offering assembly for a low fee. They have a multiple pick and place machines with common components after each other.

The reason it seems like a good idea is people don't see things like the time spent tweaking as a cost. It is also to some extent true for laser cutters and 3d printers.

I get what you mean. I definitely wouldn't say Shenzhen is a modern city as such, despite the skyscrapers and greenery. That is part of the charm though. It is, or used to be, an order of magnitude cheaper to live in SZ than HK. There is of course also absurd levels of inequality, which is less charming but reality.

> The US didn’t make special economic areas, they just arose organically.

True enough. I just don't think Shenzhen is special enough as an economic zone to make a difference in the US. Somewhere like Nevada is probably ahead of Shenzhen in terms of economic freedom. There is an even more special zone in Shenzhen called the Futian Free Trade Zone which might be special even in relation to the US. But I am not sure that it has much impact overall.

> There are big differences between a command and control economy (China) and a more liberal one where things just happen (or don’t).

Right. That is partly why I don't think Shenzhen, while certainly interesting in itself, offers that many lessons for the west. Unless you are happy with "wait until the rust belt is desperate, then expand Seattle by 10x with government backed capital, make workers live in dorms".

I guess one way to look at it is that Shenzhen is the rust belt. The big coastal cities in the US is more trade centers, like Hong Kong. Before the information age people had to be close to the factories. When manufacturing moved to China the rich became free to move to the coastal trade centers instead. Predictably those trade centers aren't developing much, because the workers aren't part of that migration.

> We are reminded of that in whenever it rains all he roads flood or freezing my butt off in southern china in winter because indoor heating is too luxurious.

That is true of Europe too though. Up north there is district heating and double glazed windows with argon in between, while down south they run the pipes on the outside of the buildings in some places. Paris flooded a few days ago. Granted that is an old city.

I do think there is something to be said about the standard of living in the US. As much as public infrastructure might be "not as good as the good parts of e.g. China", private infrastructure is certainly of a high economic standard. It might very well be that people in the US have to change the way they live, which seems to have been developed for good times, to be competitive.

There are obviously differences. The point I am trying to make is that there is no one answer. It is not like the flaw happened to be that the US has 5% too high corporate tax and if you lower that somewhere will become Shenzhen.

Shenzhen is special because it was the first area in China to liberalize. The US have already have those features, including special economic zones in form of states.

So if Shenzhen is successful because it is special shouldn't the US make some areas special as well? It essentially already did in the form of e.g. the bay area.

But Shenzhen didn't stop growing. California has plenty of space in the Central Valley, but no infrastructure.

Shenzhen built ~200 subway stations in 15 years. The US is trying to build that rail line between SF and LA. (The line between HK and SZ is delayed because of HK though).

So there is no one answer. It is all there. Sure, you could say that the government should step in, tax the tech companies, build infrastructure and allocate land for these cities to expand. But that wouldn't be very popular with voters.

Or one could move to Wyoming (?) and pay little tax. But what makes that place special in comparison to other places and what is going to keep people there as living costs go up? And once the companies succeed and the state wants to invest in infrastructure why wouldn't the companies just leave?

The best I can come up with is to find some underutilized university and build an incubator where the state (or a company, probably a non-profit) invests in companies for equity while offering some cash, free living and office space. The profits are then used to execute a long term development plan of the area. But that is of course as hard to do as anything else.